Dammit. I’m not fond of ID guessing games, but I’m hoping someone can give me some idea of what bird I’ve been hearing all spring, mostly around dawn and dusk. It has a song consisting of two quick dropping/falling notes that change pitch with each pair. So in musical terms, the song would look like “DB {pause} GC {pause} CA {pause}” and so on. I’ve heard it in several different large apartment complexes and other urban-ish areas in the metroplex, from Plano to Lewisville, so it must be a common city dweller.
While we’re on the subject, when I was a kid, waiting for the bus in Indiana, there was a very melodic birdsong I used to whistle back, and I swear the bird would respond! It would pause, then get closer and sing again with little variations. Can’t give you sheet music of it, but it was basically a (high) E-C…E-C-E-D…B… Would love to know what that bird was, because I never could tell which one was singing, but had many a pleasant “conversation” with it at 7 a.m.
Do you get Hermit Thrushes there? I know they breed in Alaska and winter in Mexico, so they might stop in Texas during migrations. Their call is just as you described in your musical notation, except it ends in a very high pitched sound, almost dog-whistle range.
It’s definitely not a mocker, since the whole song (about five pairs of notes, each pair always falling high-low) is repeated along the whole pattern. Immediately. Frequently. Incessantly. I’ve never once heard a mocker say the same thing twice in a row, let alone repeated like that.
Elemenopy, I mentally “sang” that as a birdcall, and it seems familiar to me, too.
I’ll dig up some thrush and bobwhite songs and see if those fit the bill. (bah-dum!)
Chickadees do have that descending-third two-note song, but each individual only sings one such pair of notes, so to get the effect described in the OP you would need several chickadees calling in the same area.
Well, purplehorseshoe, any resolution? We’d love to know! (I’m still rooting for the Hermit Thrush or a close relative…but maybe not, since I guess they’d only sing incessantly in their breeding range, which I think is much further north.)
I’m not the OP, but I am in the DFW area, near where Garland, Plano, and Richardson run together. We do get hermit thrushes occasionally here, I hear them in the woods behind my house. A couple of months ago there was a dead one on my deck, who had apparently crashed into my window.
However, the HT’s call doesn’t sound at all like what I gather from the OP’s description.
My first thought from the description was the tufted titmouse, which we have tons of here. It’s typically three sets of high-low, high-low, high-low, but each of the three is about the same pitch. Could that be it?
By the way, I wonder why it is that anytime there’s a dead bird on my deck who’s crashed into a window (this happens about twice a year), it is so often visitor birds that I hardly ever see. The last one was the hermit thrush, before that it was a cedar waxwing, which we do get migrating through but I’ve never seen one behind my house, and before that it was an American redstart, the only one of that species I’ve ever seen. The chickadees, titmice, goldfinches, house finches, and cardinals that are so abundant never hit my windows.
The birds that hit your windows are more likely to be migrants that are just passing through and not familiar with the area. The resident birds have had a chance to learn where your house is and so don’t crash into it.
I poked around tapu’s link, and it’s definitely not the hermit thrush. The entry for the tufted titmouse isn’t this bird, either, but now I know the real name of what I’d started referring to as The PeterBird. So thank you for clearing up that side mystery.
I’ll listen to some of the other ones I know to be common around here and see if I stumble onto the right one. If I can record the song I’ll try to figure out how to post a link here. Thanks for the ideas so far - keep 'em coming if you have any others!
Lesser Goldfinch ? When mingling in a flock, Lesser Goldfinches make a very common contact call that’s wheezy and descending, given one or two notes at a time.
So thank you for clearing up that side mystery.